How to add Twitter Cards to Blogger

When you share a post to Facebook or Google+, they display a summary of the post and also a thumbnail if available. Twitter has also come up with a similar solution called Twitter Cards.Twitter has come up with different types of Cards and this tutorial will help you in adding a summary card to your Blogger posts.
Blog Posts which have the summary card added will show a View Summary Option

and when you click on that it will show the actual Twitter Card. If you need to see live demos, check out our Twitter Page .

Why should I add Twitter Cards

When you add twitter cards to your blog, your blog posts will look more elegant when shared on twitter. This will apply to any twitter account and not just yours.People will be able to get a quick preview of your Blog Post even before they actually visit your blog.

How to add Twitter Cards to Blogger

Adding twitter cards is really easy and you can do the same by following the below steps
1. Edit your template and add the Twitter card mark-up. - Login to your Blogger account and
and go to Template > Edit HTML
Click somewhere within the Template Editor and press Ctrl + F to search within the template.
Search for </head> and paste the below code just above that . You will have to modify the first @bloggerplugins in the below code with the name of the twitter account which you use for your blog.You can modify the second @bloggerplugins to the name of the blog author’s twitter account. Since I don’t have a separate one, I am using the same at both places but if you have separate accounts, then do use them

so that it looks like
and Save your template.
2. Next Step is to add Meta Descriptions & images to your Blogger Post – While making a blogger post, make sure that you add a Search Description to it.Also make sure that you have added an image to the post. If you don’t do any of these, the post won’t display a twitter card. Adding a Search Meta Description to your blogger post will also help in improving the way your posts are presented on Search Engines. So make sure that you add it to every post that you make.

3. Final step is to request for approval from Twitter.To do that Go to Twitter Developer Site at https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator and go to the Validate & Apply tab
Give the URL of your blog post(To which you have added a search description and image) and click on the go button. Twitter will validate the card mark-up and if everything is ok it will show an option to request for approval. Do that and once it gets approved you will get an email from Twitter. This process takes around 5-10 day as of now.

Once approved, all your posts which have an image and search description will start showing twitter cards when you or anyone else shares your post to twitter. This will also reflect to old tweets.
If you have any more queries do let us know via comments or the Forum.

Bigger Featured Images on Twitter.

The twitter summary card which we just configured will display a 120px by 120px thumbnail image on Twitter. It will look something similar to

In case you want a bigger featured image and not a small thumbnail, you can follow the below instructions. Below is a sample tweet which has a bigger featured image.

To make use of such big featured images, change the below line of code

<meta content='summary' name='twitter:card'/>

to

<meta content='summary_large_image' name='twitter:card'/>

Once this is done, use the twitter card validator to validate and request access for the 'summary_large_image' card type. When you use the bigger summary card, always make sure that the first image in your post is big enough(atleast 280px in width and 150 px in height).

Last Update : This post was last updated on 17/01/2015 so that the code uses the first image in your post and not the 72px thumbnail of the same.

I am in no way a connoisseur of html or web development, so bare with me.I tried to create a twitter "summary_large_image" card type for my blog which is quite similar to the "photo" type card. I applied and got approved from the twitter development site.

However, the problem is that the "data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl" tag that i used for the image og, is not cutting it, as blogger generates a s72-c size thumbnail, and that isn't big enough for the "summary_large_size" or "photo" type twitter card.

which partly works, as it generates a 610 image for the twitter card. However, the problem is that it stil uses the default s72-c thumbnail and stretches it, which makes it look pixelated.

My question is, if there is a way to implement on that above tag, something to replace the s72-c size with s610. Perhaps (and I am only guessing here) with some command along the lines of your previous article:http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2012/01/wrong-description-image-facebook.html

Recently blogger has introduced a new template tag. You can use data:blog.postImageUrl instead of data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl to get a full size image of the first image in your post. This post has also been updated to make use of the bigger image.

Thank you very much for your Twitter Cards Tutorial. It is so easy to follow. I got approved within 5 minutes for my summary card after I applied. Thank so very much again! Please keep up the excellent work.

Do I have to fill out any of the info on the try cards? Or just go right to the Validate and apply? I am getting the "Invalid card type" over and over again. I checked my settings and everything else is right.

Thanks for the kind words. In case you need a bigger image on Twitter, we have updated the post so that the code uses the first image in the post rather than using the 72 pixel thumbnail of the first image :-)